The right tools are an integral part of getting any job done. In the world of digital content tools are plentiful, so finding the right one for you can be tricky. That's why we ask the experts what tools they use to get their jobs done. In this month's installment, we talk to Ashley Taylor Anderson, Director of Content, Ceros.

November 2012 Issue

News Features

First there was Blogger. Then there was Twitter. Now, somewhere in between those concepts is Medium, the ambitious new creation of co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, who are responsible for all three social media online publishing tools.Launched recently by Williams' and Stone's Obvious Corp., Medium offers a fresh take on blogging by combining some of the best features already built into competitor sites such as Tumblr, Pinterest, reddit, and Zeen. Medium's design lets users collaborate on works consisting of words and/or images that are published on the site. After reading a work, users can provide feedback to the author, indicate if they liked it, and supplement it with additional content.

What happens if the lights go out? It's a question that strikes fear into the hearts of content providers everywhere--especially those that have transitioned from preserving hard copies to digital storage. Decisions about how to protect content-in this case, digital content--should be based both on an assessment of the purpose and value of that content and the development of a policy that outlines what is stored and how it is stored.

Featured Stories

Consumers are demanding their entertainment on a variety of platforms, and everywhere you look it seems like everything is streaming. But is that sustainable? There is not only the issue of monetization, but there's bandwidth too. Can we all stream our favorite shows and music? And can companies make enough money to keep producing the content?

As the publishing industry continues to evolve, publishers are experimenting with new online models. But to find the right commerce solution, you must think about your primary objectives. Are you building a branded content destination, or are you glad to attract followers around the edges of the digital world in social media outlets or around other properties that do not bear your brand name? Is video an enhancement to your message or a distraction? Is your content valuable to other brands? All of these things must be considered before you choose a commerce model.

For electronic content providers and digital publishers, the age-old question remains: fee or free? Today, the answer for many lies somewhere in between-in other words, freemium. As a business model, freemium-offering a completely gratis but possibly feature-limited product or service that also allows options for premium upgrades/options that users can pay for-is increasingly in vogue, as evidenced by the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Google, and countless other businesses offering free versions of products used by millions today. (Case in point: IHS recently revealed that an astounding 96% of all smartphone apps downloaded in 2011 were free.)

Columns

There is little doubt that we are living in a new age of journalism. The internet has clearly put pressure on traditional publications. Stories are published faster. There is less fact-checking and editorial oversight. Virtually anyone with even a hint of technical savvy can publish to the web. Many of the more traditional rules of journalism have gone by the wayside, and while much of this change is positive, that doesn't mean all of the old rules don't still apply. Some should remain guiding lights, regardless of the medium, but too often lately we have seen modern journalism steer off course.

You see references to "Big Data" everywhere. Even on the personal side, we all share a common sense of information overload. We don't (can't) back up all our information-personal, business, shared, and social-since it is stored in so many places. We often can't find critical pieces of information. And that's just our own. Expand the scope to massive corporate data sets, and the problem becomes mind-numbing. We also know that we aren't getting all the value that's available in this data storm. Not getting sufficient value from that information may be the biggest problem of all.

Publishing and education group Pearson, PLC announced in August that it has launched a higher education college in the U.K. As of September 2012, Pearson College offers business degrees to a small "pioneer" intake of 40 students, becoming the first FTSE 100 company directly delivering undergraduate degrees in the U.K. A larger intake of students will embark on their studies in September 2013.

Old school marketing drives me nuts. Whenever I encounter it, I delete it, tune it out, turn it down, or fast-forward past it. And, I'm not alone.According to the folks over at GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications, 80% of business decision makers prefer to read informative articles about subjects of interest to them. What they don't like are advertisements and thinly veiled marketing disguised as something interesting.

As I write this column, many of my friends are rushing to preorder the iPhone 5 (and by the time this issue publishes, they will no doubt be enjoying a bigger screen and a better Siri--at least for the first week or so). While they were all salivating over the latest and greatest from Apple, I went down to my local wireless store in the middle of the afternoon, walked up to a sales associate, and promptly asked for the 99 cent iPhone 4. Yes, you read that correctly. I did not even bother to fork over the $99 for the 4S.

Case Studies

In 2007, Wiley acquired Blackwell Publishing, growing its Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (STMS) content to more than 1,500 journals, 9,000-plus books, reference works, and databases offered in print and electronically. This content is invaluable to the world's research and scholarly communities, and granting permission for reuse of this information posed a great challenge for Wiley's rights and permissions team. Following the merger, Wiley was suddenly receiving hundreds of permissions requests each day, with no efficient way to provide prompt turnaround. Its former manual email-based procedure would not suffice, and Blackwell's semi-automated method was also not satisfactory. Customers and employees alike were frustrated, and Wiley knew that it needed a solution that would please everyone and streamline the process.